"The cover article in The Times Magazine on Sunday profiled the singer and political activist M.I.A. While discussing her efforts to draw attention to the civil war in her home country, Sri Lanka, she was quoted as saying: 'I wasn't trying to be like Bono. He's not from Africa-- I'm from there. I'm tired of pop stars who say, 'Give peace a chance.' I'd rather say, 'Give war a chance.' The whole point of going to the Grammys was to say, 'Hey, 50,000 people are gonna die next month, and here's your opportunity to help.' And no one did.'

While M.I.A. did make those remarks, she did not make the entire statement at the same point in the interview, or in the order in which it was presented. The part that begins, 'The whole point of going to the Grammys,' up to the end of the quotation, actually came first. The part that begins, 'I wasn't trying to be like Bono,' and ends, 'Give war a chance,' came later in the same interview. The article should have made clear that the two quotations came from different parts of the interview."

Coupled with the leaked audio from the interview-- which has M.I.A. saying her Grammy appearance "wasn't about accolades or fame"-- it seems as if her warmongering zealotry may have been overstated a bit. Then again, she did say "give war a chance." But a correction is a correction, and it does make you wonder if Hirschberg's desire for a strong angle got in the way of her piece's veracity.

(Ulterior crackpot theory I just thought of: Perhaps New York Times columnist and notorious peacenik Bono is behind this entire charade!)

Even more damning was Hirschberg's recent statement to The New York Observer about the part of the piece that depicted M.I.A. as a truffle-fry-eating hypocrite. The writer said, "I don't think the French fries illustrate that much about her character." But, as The Village Voice's Zach Baron tactfully points out, "This statement, of course, is entirely disingenuous-- details like the above are included in profiles precisely because they are assumed to be illuminating, character-wise."